


All These Years

by pellucid



Category: Lie to Me (TV)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 19:30:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1238263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Gillian Foster and Zoe Landau passed the Bechdel test.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All These Years

**Author's Note:**

> Written in May 2010.

1\. 2000

Gillian had been working with Cal so much recently that inviting him and Zoe to dinner had seemed like a good idea: why shouldn't all four of them get to know one another? Almost immediately, she regretted the decision. Alec and Zoe, it turned out, were on opposite sides of some intricate brouhaha between State and Justice, and they spent much of the evening looking pained with their efforts not to snip at each other. Cal, who found the situation amusing, started trying to bait them, and when Gillian sent him a warning glance, she received one of her own from his wife. 

At the earliest decent opportunity, she announced dessert and brought in the raspberry chocolate torte she'd spent the evening before slaving over.

Gillian breathed a sigh of relief as she watched Zoe's eyes close in rapture after the first bite. 

"Oh my god, Gillian!" Zoe exclaimed. "This is amazing! You made this yourself?"

"Baking is a bit of a hobby," Gillian confessed. "I'm glad you like it."

"Like doesn't begin to cover it. Would you be willing to part with the recipe?"

"Of course. It's a bit involved but not difficult—and well worth the effort, I think," Gillian answered.

"Thank you!" Zoe said with a grin. "I've got a fabulous cheesecake recipe with white chocolate and raspberries, but I've been hunting the perfect chocolate raspberry torte."

"White chocolate raspberry cheesecake?" Gillian replied with interest. "Oh, do tell!"

2\. 2009

When the phone rang late one Friday evening, Gillian was surprised to see Zoe's number on the caller id. She fought a wave of dread—most of the scenarios she could imagine in which Zoe would call her were bad. 

"Hello?" she answered with trepidation.

"Gillian, she's going over to the dark side. You've got to help me pull her back!"

"What? Zoe, what's—who? What are you talking about?" 

"Emily. Basketball. Sorry, I wasn't very clear," Zoe apologized.

Gillian smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. She and Zoe, despite the various ups and downs of their acquaintance, had always shared a passion for basketball, and there were full years in which their only conversations—or at least their only civil conversations—had revolved around the sport. Emily, too, was an avid basketball fan, to the delight of both her mother and her father's partner. 

"So what's Emily done?" Gillian asked, trying to imagine an offense dire enough to inspire this phone call.

"She's fallen under the spell of John Wall," Zoe said with resignation. "Which, okay, the kid can _play_ , and I'm not going to pretend he can't. But it's one thing to admire his talent and it's another thing entirely to become a Kentucky fan. It's clear he's a one-and-done anyway. But no, suddenly she thinks she bleeds blue or some such bullshit."

"Come on, Zoe, she's old enough to know better! You can't be a fairweather Kentucky fan. You love them or you hate them, and god, their fans are _crazy_." Gillian paused. "It's probably just a phase."

"Part of her teenage rebellion or something," Zoe added. "The makings of an embarrassing story to tell her ten years down the road."

"Look on the bright side, Zoe: at least she hasn't suddenly decided to support Duke."

3\. 2016

Zoe and Gillian pushed through the sea of graduates and their families, attempting to follow Emily's vague directions. Zoe concluded that for the most part, the William and Mary graduation ceremony had gone off beautifully: perfect weather, an interesting and—more importantly—brief commencement speaker, and a happy daughter. Her only complaint was the inadequacy of the bathroom facilities.

"There," she heard Gillian say, and Zoe looked where Gillian pointed.

"Where?" Zoe asked. "You're not even pointing at a building."

"No, but that's no ordinary crowd of people there. Those are all women, and they're in a line. It's got to be nearby."

"Good god," Zoe sighed as she walked toward what was indeed a line of women.

Zoe wished it were less true that women tended to go to the bathroom in packs. Not only would the line be shorter, but she might have felt less inclined to go along when Gillian mentioned she needed to find the ladies' room. As it was, Zoe found herself stuck with Gillian for an indeterminate amount of time. She and Gillian had arrived at an unspoken truce of sorts by the time Cal and Gillian got married: they could leave the past in the past and focus on what they shared.

What they shared, however, was basketball, baking, Emily, and Cal. Cal was off-limits as a topic of conversation, and over the course of the graduation weekend they had exhausted basketball, shared all their new recipes, and had the same non-conversation about Emily's future five or six times. ("I'm completely in favor of a humanities degree, but a BA in history isn't an end in itself; and if she has a career in mind, she hasn't mentioned it." "She's smart and still has plenty of time; she'll figure it out.")

"When I graduated from college, it was freezing," Zoe recalled, breaking the silence that was beginning to grow awkward. Gillian turned expectantly, so Zoe continued. "It was Northwestern, but even Chicago has predictably decent weather by this time of year. But there was a cold front. No rain, so they kept it outside in the stadium, and we all sat there in our spring dresses and sandals, shivering under the caps and gowns. I don't remember anything else about it."

"I did my undergrad at UCLA," Gillian said. "I don't remember the weather, really, but I assume it was beautiful, if hot. I just remember that I'd asked my father to stay sober for my graduation, and he did. He went off cold turkey at the last minute and ended up with withdrawal symptoms so severe that he missed the ceremony. It was probably a boring ceremony anyway; they usually are."

Zoe opened her mouth, unsure of how to respond—she felt like she'd just learned more about Gillian in the past five seconds than she had in the previous fifteen years—when suddenly Gillian seemed to realize what she'd said and to whom.

"Sorry," Gillian said quickly, with half a nervous laugh. "I didn't mean to put a damper on things. That was all a long time ago." The tone of her voice told Zoe not to pursue the subject, and Zoe was just as glad to leave it.

"I wonder what Emily will remember about this day when she thinks back on it in thirty years," Zoe mused.

Gillian's smile was relieved. "If she'd come with us, surely this neverending line for the bathroom would stand out. Because she didn't, hopefully she'll just remember that it was a beautiful day."

4\. 2024

Zoe brought another tray of hors d'oeuvres into the living room where Gillian was arranging the pink and yellow ribbon on the gift table.

"Emily just called," Gillian said. "She's on her way."

"Good," Zoe answered. "I was worried that everyone would get here before the guest of honor and then the grandmothers-to-be would have to open all the gifts ourselves."

Gillian smiled. "I suppose we'll have to exercise some restraint, then."

5\. 2047

Hospice had been in for two weeks—or so the nurse had reminded Zoe that morning. She didn't have a strong sense of time passing anymore, just the strange cycles of sleep, waking, and pain. She would sometimes think of something Cal said when he was dying, about time losing its linearity. She hadn't understood it at the time. Instead she'd seen only the bone-tired expression on Gillian's face that spoke of time dragging through hours watching Cal take too-shallow breaths, and Emily's panic that suggested even this slow death was happening too quickly. In her own slow death, however, Zoe felt past, present, and future collapsing in on each other in the space of Emily's spare bedroom that she now occupied.

Emily came in when the late afternoon sun warmed the room. "How are you feeling, Mom?"

"I thought I heard Gillian," Zoe said, more a commentary, she thought, on the past forty years than the present moment.

"Yeah," Emily replied. "She stopped by. I'm sorry if we woke you talking in the other room."

"She's here now? Tell her I'd like to see her." Zoe smiled softly at the surprise in her daughter's face. Even after everything, Zoe and Gillian had never been friends.

"Sure, Mom."

Gillian came in a moment later, and Zoe saw, at once, the familiar, 80-year-old Gillian; Gillian as Zoe had first met her, so many years ago at a Pentagon cocktail party; and all the Gillians in between, hovering at the periphery, but also somehow the center, of Zoe's life for more than half of it.

"Hello, Zoe," Gillian said, and Zoe had never been more grateful not to be addressed with the standard "how are you feeling?"

"They've told me I should say goodbye to my family," Zoe explained. "Emily and David and the kids have been spending time with me. My brother came last week. And Susan. You remember Susan, my best friend from law school?" Gillian smiled and nodded, but Zoe couldn't remember whether Susan and Gillian had met or not. Perhaps at Emily's wedding. "I've said goodbye to everyone who is left. Everyone but you."

Gillian reached out and took her hand. "I'm honored." 

Zoe closed her fingers around Gillian's. "I confess I never did learn to like you very much—" Gillian's laugh interrupted "—but we have been family all these years whether we liked it or not."

"Yes," answered Gillian. "Yes, we have been."


End file.
